Back to the Land: November 2023 the year of olives

November is going fast and the hard work of the last two weeks collecting olives will not be easily forgotten.

As promised in the last post, we want to update the situation with this year's olives. The trees have produced the most abundant crop that I personally can remember. We started collecting olives on Thursday 2nd November and the weather was good all the way through for two weeks that we helped. Sunny and warm with the occasional breeze. So far we have collected 300 kg of olives but they still have probably another 300 kg to go if not more.

Team work; Andrea performing acrobatics to collect the out -of-reach olives; though he prefers to let the trusty Panda help by providing battery power for the 'olive tickling' appliance, called, apparently, an 'abacchiatore'.

We decided to maximise our team's potential by carrying out the major pruning and the olive collection at the same time. So Tonino went ahead, climbing into the trees or balancing on the broken ladder, to remove unwanted branches and shoots that would in future complicate, but not improve, the production. This involves the removal of substantial quantities of timber which are collected for household use. The remaining branches and foliage have to be burned. Until recently he would have been using a pruning saw or a chain-saw. Now he also has a very handy battery-powered handsaw and secuteurs, which make the task (a little) less arduous and definitely quicker, though probably just as risky......

My brother Tonino lying on a bed of olives and Lesley and me working on pruned branches.

Reflection:
The most amazing thing which touched me was a comment from one of our elderly neighbours. He is from Orgosolo and he has a piece of land not far from ours. He stopped his car one day on his way to work to chat with me (this is a normal thing as these people visit their land basically everyday) and he told me how he pleased he was to see our olive trees producing a good crop for the first time in a decade. He said that the pleasure in seeing the abundance of olives was as great as if it was his own olive crop. His comment is an example of the closeness this people have to the land, even if it is not their own.

A tree after pruning

The first task for us is to prepare the tree or group of trees by spreading nets on the ground around them or in the corridors between the rows. Some weeks previously the ground will have been strimmed of dead grass to enable this. Then it's just a matter of dislodging every olive you see from its branch, whether still attached to the tree or on the ground, making sure it lands on a net! Some people use their bare hands to strip the branches, some wear gloves, and wimps like us use a plastic comb similar to the toy rakes kids play with on the beach. The aim of the pruning is to encourage branches that drop down, making their fruit easier to reach, but inevitably many more mature trees are too tall or in an awkward position, so we have to either climb them or use a picker on an extension pole. Once a group of trees has been stripped, we collect the olives in crates ready to be transported to a local mill to be transformed into oil. We were collecting an average of 12 crates of olives every day. About 20 kg each. Every 100 kg was producing about 15 litres of olive oil.

Collecting olives at Graziano's land both in Esporlatu and in Locoe. In Esporlatu which is in very hilly region about an hour's journey away, we were working on an extremely steep slope where it was often impossible to avoid slipping on the nets. We were joined by Graziano's family, so proceedings were happily interrupted by a magnificent picnic! Unfortunately, in order to make the most of the good weather and availability of manpower, we cannot afford to stop too often or for very long in the course of a day's work.

The final week here in Locoe is dedicated to burning all the off cuts from the pruning of the olive trees. We want to leave the place clean.

Almond and olive trees against the early evening sunset in Locoe

The exceptionally hot weather persisted throughout the whole of September and October, so Battistino finally managed to jolly his brother into carrying out the long-overdue refurbishment of the water reservoir (pool) used for watering in the dry periods of the year. So having emptied the pool, moved the goldfish (!) to a pool in another part of the land, Battistino re-rendered the outside and inside walls and floor and Tonino re-plastered them and applied a waterproof paint. It now looks quite inviting!

Early in October, we were delighted to welcome friends Halina and Rory who were holidaying in Sardinia.....we were interested to hear their comments on our family 'farm' and look forward to finding out what else they got up to on their brief trip.

On 18th October, we made a trip to Sassari as Lesley was to sit her Italian Cittadinanza exam at the university there. She is attempting to obtain an Italian passport and this is the first step. We treated ourselves to a hotel for a couple of nights and took the opportunity of meeting up for a pizza with Anna, Marco and their daughter Martina. As we had travelled north from Locoe, we decided to complete the tour by heading east towards Marazzino for a week at the seaside as the weather was still very warm. On the way we stopped for a couple of hours to change buses in Castelsardo, an historic coastal resort in a prominent position on the north coast of the island. Its old walled town is on the cliff-top. Despite having bypassed the town many times before, we found that we had never visited properly. Only a brief stop was enough to persuade us that we needed to spend more time there to explore properly on another occasion.